Which Languages Transfer Best to Warlpiri? A Similarity-Based Study for Low-Resource ASR
This paper investigates how language similarity can improve cross-lingual transfer for automatic speech recognition (ASR) in extremely low-resource settings. Warlpiri, an Australian Aboriginal language, has very limited transcribed speech data, making transfer learning essential. We propose a framework combining acoustic similarity from pre-trained speech models with linguistic similarity based on typology, phoneme inventories, grammatical, and syntactic features to rank high-resource source languages and evaluate their effectiveness for ASR transfer to Warlpiri. Experiments with Whisper show that acoustically and typologically similar languages outperform monolingual and multilingual bas...
| Authors | Pravina Mylvaganam, Eliathamby Ambikairajah, Ting Dang et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 11 July 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 11 July 2026 |
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